Milwaukee Sentinel Article (August 22, 1980): ‘It’s All a Game at Gen Con’

Here’s the 36-year-old Tom Wham, who designed the canonical Snit’s Revenge and The Awful Green Things from Outer Space:

I’ve been making up games since my dad game me a Monopoly set…

It’s a chance to create an alternate world where people can be things they can’t be in the real world. You can create a place in which you can have power over something.

Compare this to an H.P. Lovecraft quote I shared on Facebook yesterday: “There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.”

The article goes on to describe RPGs as “power-to-the-people” games, which I thought was a keen observation for the time.

There were 5000 attendees at Gen Con in 1980. In 2013, there were 50,000.